No Way Out
by Animegirl1129
Summary: The first ghosts Dennis Rafkin Ever saw belonged to his parents.


No Way Out

**_Written for Yuletide 2009 for Truth, who requested a look into how Dennis got to the party. Thir13en Ghosts isn't mine, original people are. Enjoy!_**

* * *

The first ghosts Dennis Rafkin ever saw belonged to his parents.

He was six at the time, and he'd just walked home from the bus stop when it happened. He'd reached up to turn the doorknob to walk into his house, wondering why his mother hadn't been at the end of the street waiting for him, like she always was, and suddenly there was pain all over, but mostly centering in his head, and he was on his knees by the front door.

Images flashed in his mind of a man, a stranger, breaking into their home and slaying his parents in cold blood. His mom and dad, they only stared solemnly at him as he watched the re-run of their murder, their eyes boring into him in such a way that it seemed they were asking why he didn't stop it all, like it was all his fault.

Dennis passed out on the front steps, hit his head, and woke up in the hospital some un-established amount of time later, with a really official looking police officer stationed outside of the door to his room.

"Son, are you up to talking now?" The man asked him, Officer Collins, his badge read. The detective rested a comforting hand on his shoulder and Dennis started seeing things again, the man's entire life – a childhood of abuse, some brutal time spent in the military, his wedding to a woman since dead, killing a suspect in a police raid - it all flashed in Dennis' head and he started screaming in terror as his six year old mind struggled to take it all in.

He started seizing and the doctor's came rushing in, muttering about head injuries and concussions and brain damage, all things Dennis didn't understand. They put him on some medication and sent him off to a foster home. The police chalked the crime up to a burglary gone badly, and since Dennis never talked about what he saw, they never did catch the guy who killed his parents.

* * *

The medicine seemed to control it all for a little while, up until his first night in another in a long series of foster homes. This one seemed promising so far, but Dennis had already learned not to get his hopes up.

It was his first night in his new room, with his new family – the Bryson's. He'd been put to bed and the Scooby Doo nightlight flicked on, a kiss on the cheek from his new mom and he was left alone to his own devices in the night.

His new foster brother, Michael, all of eight years old, climbed out of the bed on the other side of the room and moved to loom over him. "Hey, get up, I wanna play." The older boy had prompted.

But, Dennis had shaken his head, didn't want to break the rules on his first night.

Michael hadn't liked that and he'd tugged on Dennis' pajama clad arm to get him up and moving. Unexpectedly, a sharp, searing pain slashed through the young boy's skull, sending him into hysterics once again. He screamed, cried as the pictures flew through his mind too fast for him to make any sense of them. He didn't even see them this time; they were just part of the pain of whatever was happening to him all over again.

Michael had grabbed him tighter at that – which only made everything worse – in an attempt to aid him, and just a moment later, the older boy's parents had come rushing in to see what all the fuss was about.

They'd taken him to the ER. No one had found anything wrong with him. It was written of as a nightmare, but Michael was always nice to him after that.

He'd stayed with them for close to five years before he was placed with another family.

* * *

There were no goodnight kisses or Scooby Doo nightlights in his new home. The family who'd offered to take him in, the Nash's proved to be more of a dictatorship than anything actually resembling a family. He and two other boys, Taylor and Will, his foster brothers, were shipped off to school for several hours a day, walking there and back no matter the conditions. Upon arriving home, they were not allowed to watch television, nor permitted to have dessert. Their rooms had to be spotless if they wanted to go outside, and worst of all, for Dennis, the medication – stronger doses now that actually seemed to help most of the time – was forbidden.

Were he to complain of nightmares or his so-called delusions, he was sent to time out for making up 'stories'. If he passed out after his foster dad tried to force him into playing ball, he was left lying wherever he fell until such a time that he stopped acting so 'dramatic'.

At just eleven years old, he was all but a social outcast at school. Sports were out of the question – if anyone touched him, he'd end up on his knees with memories flashing through his mind – memories he would never have himself, of growing up with a happy family. And the ghosts, the ghosts were everywhere now. Two were living at his house and they'd keep him up at night with their endless bickering.

He'd been there for a month and half when he passed out at school one day after some older kids jumped him in the cafeteria. They'd sent him into a series of seizures, amused at his pain, even as he saw through his visions how pitiful their own lives were.

The school had called his foster parents to tell them that Dennis was being sent to the hospital, but they'd refused to come, believing that he was simply faking it to get attention.

Children's Services picked him up when he was discharged and they stuck him in some foster care facility for close to two years before he got a home again.

* * *

The family he spent the rest of his foster care years with, the Sanders', were quite accommodating when it came to Dennis' unique conditions. They didn't touch him, they homeschooled him so that he didn't have to deal with the kids at school who'd pick on him, they had him checked for brain tumors, brain injuries, and everything else they could think of to find an answer for him, which Dennis himself desperately wanted by this point. The tests revealed nothing, but at least he knew that they'd tried.

At age eighteen, when he aged out of the foster program, he graduated high school and got a place of his own, and two weeks after that, the Sanders' car mysteriously ended up in a wreck on the way to work and his beloved foster parents were dead by the time a police car arrived on scene.

Dennis saw their ghosts all over the place after that.

* * *

By age 21, he'd gotten hooked on the drugs that controlled his unexplainable insanity, had started drinking, and was quite thoroughly in debt.

He'd been on his way back to his hellhole of an apartment when a stranger – and had he not been drunk out of his skull, he might have recognized the man as an older version of the one who'd starred in his first vision, the one who'd led his parent's to their untimely demise – approached him.

"Dennis, Dennis Rafkin, right?" The man asked, offering a hand. And Dennis was too intoxicated and uncaring to even wonder why the old kook knew his name. He ignored the guy and kept walking. "I know what's wrong with you!"

He stopped, turned to face him. Surely this man couldn't be talking about what Dennis thought he meant. "Yeah, old man?"

"I can help you." He ushered Dennis to return to him and he handed him a couple of crisp hundred dollar bills. "Get yourself cleaned up and meet me here, okay?" The man offered a business card, then. The name emblazoned at its top read 'Cyrus Kriticos'.

Reluctantly, Dennis nodded his consent.

"You won't regret it, boy."


End file.
